Back to Agile

One of the reasons that I started this blog was that I found myself doing a lot of reading and talking about Agile development. Agile is a term for a group of software development methodologies (see here for more info) that we've been trying out here at Kaplan.

and then of course, I started reading fiction again and that was the end of that.

One of the things I like about Agile is that it is (like a blogger) enormously reflective. One of the principles is that the process is totally transparent and open for discussion and improvement. To facilitate that, we have a weekly process improvement meeting called a Kaizen, a Japanese concept taken from the Toyota engineering process.

At our last Kaizen, our CTO attended and was incredibly energized by it. He blogged about it on his blog and has been talking about adopting some of the practices in his weekly meetings.

To keep this short, here are my favorite parts:
1) Energy - people put their picks for best and worst aspects of the past week on the wall with sticky notes. So everyone has to get out of their chairs and walk to the wall, avoid everyone else and stick their notes to the wall. We then vote on the notes and everyone dances around everyone else to get to the notes they want to vote on.
2) Democracy - The worst meetings are the ones where someone is deciding what will be discussed and the people attending are not interested. At the Kaizen, we talk about issues raised by the people attending in the order that they voted. The people set the agenda.
3) Openness - We start the meeting with the prime directive which states that the purpose of the meeting is to improve everyone's process and not to blame anyone for things that went badly. This frees people up to talk about the good and the bad.
4) Timeliness - It's weekly, so we're identifying and addressing issues right when they come up and not letting them fester or get forgotten.

Stay tuned for more agility in coming posts

...and Absurdistan

Keeping with the fiction trend, I've moved SE and a little more ridiculous and been reading Shteyngart's latest, Absurdistan.

Lots of fun, very entertaining, he's got a really good sense of the absurdity of modern life in the Soviet Union, life post 9/11, war in the age of terrorism and media, and the new reality of outsourced conflicts (Halliburton et al).

It was lighter than the last two and it took me a while to get into it. But Shteyngart's not aiming as high as Chabon or Lethem and once I accepted the book for what it is, it was pretty good.

Next up, back to work-related non-fiction. I've got a growing reading list about Agile Software Development Methodologies and hope to add some inches on that topic.